Wow, hadn't thought that my post will be responsible for so much of discussion. Anyway, it's always nice to know the legal side of what we consider as 'simple' or 'common sense'...

I have also noticed that many of the German (and also Dutch) collectors / dealers do not mention their address on the letter (Or a very short address). In India, they won't even accept my letter if I haven't mentioned my address, sometimes they ask me to add contact number too. I have to add my address on custom declaration form as well; which is not the case with German (or any other) version of the form.

Aditya

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It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. -J. K. Rowling.

My dad, who until he retired was a university academic, once received an extremely delayed letter containing an academic paper reprint (this was in the 1980s, well before email and PDFs) from someone in Leningrad. When the package eventually reached him, he saw that the sender had simply written my dad's name followed by "University of Birmingham, Birmingham". The package showed evidence of having been sent to Birmingham, Alabama and been returned as undeliverable. It was then opened by the Soviet postal service, presumably in an attempt to discover who had sent it (there was no sender's address on the outside, and as it turned out none on the inside either). It was then resealed, but this time by state security as the seal had sword-and-shield KGB rubber stamp marks all along it, and sent to Birmingham, UK, where it found its intended recipient.

As to the whims of postal workers... The guy in charge of the mail room at my last job in the UK completely failed to get the reason why one if at all possible should write the local detail of the address in a form that local postal workers can read. I was sending a package to a museum in Kiev. I therefore addressed it in Cyrillic and in "backwards" order (Russia and many former Soviet republics start with the macro element and work down to the micro, so you get country (if needed), town, street, building, personal name), ending with UKRAINE in English at the bottom, where the UK postal service would expect the country to be. This guy complained that the Royal Mail wouldn't be able to read "all those funny squiggles". No amount of explaining that they didn't need to know the bits in Ukrainian, but that the Ukrainian postman may well not read Latin text, would convince him...

A friend of mine had sent me a letter from Germany. The letter landed up in Milan, Italy instead. That was bit worrisome for me, as Italy is not known to be one of the safest places to send coins to or receive from via post. Fortunately, it arrived in perfect condition, took about 3 days more than usual though.

I think person working at the sorting center of Deutsche Post got confused between Indien and Italien. First Indonesia and now Italy! Wow! I wonder how many Austria bound letters are sent to Australia and vice-versa?

Aditya

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It is our choices...that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities. -J. K. Rowling.

Ok, I did send it on the 27th of Dec 2014 and it did arrive on the 28th of March 2015.His letter started at the 29Th of March.Now I wait for the postman crossing the Sahara again - this time northward bound!

It has happened to my wife's father in respect of Rotherham and Rotterdam. Whatever the UK Royal Mail may think, they are not the same place. It is somewhat perplexing that they chose to deliver to Rotterdam when it said Rotherham on the envelope and the letter was posted in Sheffield. Sheffield is about 12 km away from Rotherham.

Modern post sorting offices have technology to read postcodes or zip codes etc rather than actual addresses so such errors should not occur. If I type the postcode for my actual house into Google Earth it zooms right in to where I live so how come the international post offices can't manage to do the same thing & read the postcode

While postal employees who can read (about half of them, judging from these stories) can read foreign postal codes also, machine reading capabilities are more widespread, but also more limited. Dutch machines have no problem with a sequence of four figures and two letters but reject everything else, while French machines do fine with five figures, but cannot possibly understand four figures and two letters. For this reason, the Dutch administration maintained that my car was not insured, while the French administration was sure it wasn't my car. It actually took a complaint to the EU Commission, a court session and a judge to figure it out.

Peter

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An unidentified coin is a piece of metal. An identified coin is a piece of history.

Modern post sorting offices have technology to read postcodes or zip codes etc rather than actual addresses so such errors should not occur. If I type the postcode for my actual house into Google Earth it zooms right in to where I live so how come the international post offices can't manage to do the same thing & read the postcode

Post code are not international. They are country specific.Sometimes, US sites ask for ZIP code ( 5 numeric) and even when you feed other country, UK ( 6 alpha numeric) or Belgium ( 4 numeric) is not accepted.India has 6 numeric PIN code.

Sooner or later, there has to be international agreement on standardization. Incidentally, even where there is a postal standardization, things do not work.Recorded or registered letters are assigned a two letter alpha code ( for type of letter) followed with a 9 digit number and end with country of origin (two letter alpha code).No where the destination code is mentioned.Try tracking a international letter and you will understand the issues involved.

Recorded or registered letters are assigned a two letter alpha code ( for type of letter) followed with a 9 digit number and end with country of origin (two letter alpha code).No where the destination code is mentioned.Try tracking a international letter and you will understand the issues involved.

Well the destination code is written by the sender as part of the address on the packet & is read electronically unless it's written badly, at least it works that way in the UK